Hi everyone, below you will find the updates from the Desktop team from the last week.

If you’re interested in discussing a topic please start a thread in the Desktop area of the Community Hub (this site).
We also have our weekly meeting on IRC. We meet on Tuesday at 13:30 UTC in #ubuntu-desktop on Freenode. There will be an “Any Other Business” section at the end where you are welcome to raise topics. These topics might be discussed during the meeting, or afterwards depending on the time, depth of conversation, topic and so on.

I rebased PR #5822 (systemd user daemons) and PR #6258 (dbus service activation) to make sure they’re still all functional post-break.

This is primarily waiting on review from the snapd folks. I’ve got dbus activation working on all platforms, spread backends, but with a 14.04 specific work around that could cause upgrade problems. So at the moment the choice is to either (a) implement some code to transition users from 14.04, or (b) remove the 14.04 workaround and document that system service activation is not supported on that distro.

snapd portals testing:

I’ve been improving PR #6313, and it should be ready for review shortly. This adds spread test coverage for portal features running against the real xdg-desktop-portal with a stubbed out UI service. Since snap portal support is still in progress, the spread tests are set to only run on particular backends for now. The plan is to expand this list as we validate that things actually work.

The open/save test is functioning on the ubuntu-18.04 backend, but fail on 18.10. The xdg-document-portal service hits an assertion and crashes there. More info at bug 1810757, along with instructions to reproduce.

xdg-desktop-portal 1.0.3 (as found on 19.04) does not hit the assertion, so that’s something to keep in mind when we look at e.g. SRUing xdg-desktop-portal into 16.04.